I'm sure that Stephen Maitzen will have useful things to say, but I wanted to chime on in this one.

You have just given a perfectly consistent description of what actually happens in a simple polarization experiment that I use most every semester as a teaching tool. Classical logic handles this case without breaking a sweat. But there's another point. You've described the phenomenon in terms of light waves. That's fine for many purposes, but note that the wave version of the story of this experiment comes from classical physics, where (for the most part at least) there's no hint of logical paradox.

The classical explanation for the result is that a polarizing filter doesn't just respond to a property that the light possesses. It also changes the characteristics of the wave. Up-down polarized light won't pass a left-right filter, but if we put a diagonal filter between the two, the classical story is that the intermediate filter lets the diagonal component of the wave pass, and when it does, the light that gets past is no longer up-down polarized. Since diagonally polarized light has a component along the left-right axis, there's no puzzle about why some light is able to pass all three filters. The proportions are given by Malus's laws, which was formulated at the beginning of the 19h century.

Now there's a more intriguing phenomenon that emerges when we do the same experiment with an ensemble of single photons. Each photon either passes a filter or it doesn't; no "partial passage." On the simple standard story, if a photon gets past a filter, it emerges polarized along the axis of the filter. Note: if we accept this story, the filter changes the photon. There's no contradiction in saying that a photon that once was polarized in one direction is now polarized in another. The probability that a photon will pass a filter is a simple function of the angle between the incoming polarization and the orientation of the filter. Now we get the pattern you describe exhibited statistically. As the number of photons gets large, the proportions among the photon counts will mirror the intensities in the wave version of the experiment. But nothing I've said here conflicts in any way with classical logic.

All this said, there is a debate about whether quantum mechanics has implications for logic. The majority opinion, both among physicists and philosophers of physics, is that quantum mechanics doesn't conflict with classical logic. The issues are technical and subtle and beyond the scope of what can be said here. My take: quantum mechanics may call for enlarging the range of logical relations that we consider, but there is nothing like a knock-down argument for this conclusion, and in particular no simple example that could settle the case.

It's important sometimes to distinguish between intellectual problems and other kinds of problems. Many, maybe most of the people I know well are atheists. They agree with you: the world doesn't contain any meaning of its own, it doesn't care about us, and nothing is permanent. The difference between most of those people and you isn't that they've had some philosophical insight that you haven't. The difference, I would gently suggest, is that you are depressed and they aren't.

I'm not a psychologist, but the way you describe your state of mind sounds like a textbook depression. How we think about things is certainly relevant when we're depressed, but the way it's relevant isn't just about content. Two people can both think that the world is indifferent to us, but for one this isn't an intrusive idea. It doesn't stop her from enjoying her work and her friends and her pastimes. It doesn't keep her awake at night. The other finds himself perseverating about it, brain caught in a loop. Getting out of that loop isn't likely to come simply from reading Camus or Sartre or anyone else.

I'd suggest talking to your doctor. He or she may be able to help you find a therapist. Given the way you describe your state of mind, you might ask if s/he knows of someone who practices cognitive-behavioral therapy. It also might turn out that a course of medication will help reset the circuitry. Both of these things (I speak from experience) can be helpful. But it's worth saying again: even if a problem has a philosophical side to it, it may not really be a philosophical problem. This sounds to me like one of those cases.

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Having said all that, let me add strictly as an afterthought that you might find Mark Johnston's book Saving God interesting. I'm not suggesting it as a substitute for the things I said above, but Johnston has an interesting perspective that might appeal to you. He's a thoroughgoing naturalist; no hint of the God of classical theism. And he thinks that we are impermanent in the most obvious sense. But he doesn't think that this makes the world meaningless. The book isn't easy reading. I wrote a review that you can find at

and which you may find helpful in following Johnston's complex argument. But this isn't intended to set aside the point above: I don't think your primary problem is a philosophical problem. If you read Johnston, wait until you've made some progress with the background issue.

You should study Wittgenstein's arguments against a private language more closely, because I don't think that his view is quite that language "cannot be with one person", although that is really a wonderful way of putting it. It seems to suggest merely the view that the nature of language is that of a interpersonal communication, which is a bit uninteresting, and yet your phrasing is profoundly interesting. I also didn't quite follow why thinking that there can be a private language goes against psychophysical dualism. Surely it's the other way round. Descartes, for example, has to think he can give sense to his words privately, because he can intelligibly doubt the existence of everyone else. And Wittgenstein himself has been thought to be a behaviourist, or closer to behaviourism than to psychophysical dualism. I am very sorry about Croatia too. I imagine you had some more beers. I did.

Both in the law and in morality we have a notion of corporate responsibility. In the case of the law, "corporate" will include corporations and that's a good place to start. Suppose it comes to light that fifty years ago, Corporation X ignored environmental requirements and polluted the water in some town. As a result, people were harmed, including children who are now living adults.. Suppose a team of journalists uncover what happened. The authorities decide to take Corporation X to court. The law would not look kindly on the argument that there are literally no members of the Corporate board or management from fifty years ago who are still alive today, and therefore Corporation X can't be found liable. But it's not just the law. If we allowed this argument to succeed, Corporation X, which continues to do business and thrive today, would get off scot free. Many people, perhaps most, would think that this is unjust.

Someone could reply with a version of the argument you've outlined, but in the context, it would beg an important question. What the example of Corporation X suggests is that moral responsibility isn't restricted to individual human agents. The example suggests that our everyday understanding of morality includes the possibility of group responsibility, and that group responsibility isn't simply the sum of the individual responsibility of individual members of the group.

Someone might reply that we don't have a good philosophical account of group responsibility. That may or may not be true; it's a question outside my own area, though you can read a summary of the state of the discussion here:

However, even if we don't have a good theory, it's not clear what follows. Many philosophers would say that our considered moral judgments are data that moral theorizing has to take account of. This doesn't mean that moral theory has to accept all of our judgments. After all, a good scientific theory doesn't have to account for every data point. But if we have a well-developed practice of assigning collective responsibility, and if the practice produces results that we generally find plausible, then the moral theorist would need a strong argument to overturn the practice.

The theoretical questions here are interesting and deep; we've barely scratched the surface. But leaving theory aside, we can also make a couple of points about the actual case. It's plausible that many people living today have been indirectly harmed by slavery. That bears on your premise P1. And even though no one alive today is causally responsible for slavery, people alive today both benefit from the history of slavery and either know or should know that they do. Whether or not this underwrites an argument that the city of Charleston, considered as a corporate "person," is obliged to apologize for slavery, it provides at least the seeds of an argument for saying that there could be a point in doing just that, and that benefits might flow from doing it. The benefits wouldn't have to be material to be genuine. They might take the form of increased mutual understanding and respect. That could be worth more than getting the metaphysics right.

Before asking if something is a solution to a problem, it's worth asking whether we've gotten the problem right.

There's a sign I found a few years ago; it's on my office door. It reads "Don't believe everything you think." Almost everyone needs that advice from time to time; I certainly do. A lot of what our brains churn out, especially when we're unhappy, just isn't true. While I was reading what you wrote, that slogan kept coming back to me. The reason? An awful lot of what you say just doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

Yes: some people have abominable values. But there are also people who are decent, thoughtful, try to do the right thing and often succeed. I'm not guessing about this. I could make a long list drawn just from people I happen to know personally. This includes people who disagree with me about lots of things, including politics and religion. Furthermore, I'm not in any way exceptional. I'm completely comfortable saying that almost everyone knows a great many good people. There are quite literally millions and millions of such people. And while I don't know where you live, I'd be willing to bet large sums of money that plenty of good and even wise people live near enough to you that you wouldn't need to go to another country to find them.

We could talk about other things you write and the conclusions would be similar. I'm not saying this to insult you or make you angry. I'm saying it because of what I said at the beginning: if we want to know whether something is a solution to a problem, it matters whether we've gotten the problem right in the first place. I don't know anything about your circumstances, and so I don't know why it seems to you that pretty much all of what you call "society" is a pack of miscreants. But since you use the word "society" for a much broader group than your own circle of acquaintances, I think I can safely say that you're suffering from a kind of illusion.

What's the cure? Specifics matter, but some general points are likely to apply. The first is the slogan on my sign: Don't believe everything you think. Really; just don't. Detach from your judgments. When big, broad, negative generalizations intrude on your thoughts, don't fight with them, don't resist them, but observe them without judgment and let them pass on through. This is the technique behind what's sometimes called "insight meditation" (a contemporary name for Buddhist Vipassana meditation) and it can be quite powerful once you get the hang of it. There's nothing mystical or supernatural or cultish about it. You don't need to take vows or wear robes. It's just a technique that centuries of experience and a fair bit of recent research bears out. What you learn is that thoughts are just thoughts. You don't need to give them power over you.

Like any technique, it takes some practice and a good teacher can be helpful. There are also things worth reading. One book from a few years ago may be worth your time: Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach. Well worth the few dollars it costs.

One other thing: Tara Brach's book talks a lot about compassion: compassion for others, but also compassion for ourselves. The world could use more of that—the world and everyone in it.

Perhaps not a bright line. But let's take relativism as our foil, where we understand relativism to mean that standards of evaluation are relative to norms, traditions, etc. of societies or groups. (I'm paraphrasing a definition from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-relativism/ ). If that view happens to be correct, notice that it doesn't leave us without a distinction between morals and manners. Even if relativism is the right meta-ethical view, we still make a distinction within this society (US society for the sake of example) between matters of politeness and matters of moral right and wrong. Close enough for our purpose, we Americans agree that stealing is wrong and not just rude. We also agree that showing up to a wedding in ragged shorts and a T-shirt is rude but not really a moral wrong (though see below). The line between the two cases seems to be something like this: we can imagine, though we might not find it an attractive prospect, that fashions might change and showing up to a wedding "badly dressed" might come to be acceptable. Nothing in the kinds of reasons we appeal to in moral argumentation provides a basis for treating the rudeness of ragged shorts at a wedding as anything deeper than custom. When we offer moral arguments, we appeal to considerations of such things as harm and fairness that we don't treat as matters of fashion. Those sorts of reasons don't get much of a grip in arguments about what to wear to weddings.

The general idea is that even if relativism is the correct metatheory, there is a set of norms, rules and reasons that limn what the group takes to constitute morality. Appeals to those kinds of reasons are what makes an argument about how to behave a moral argument. Other cases, such as whether it's okay to slurp your soup or wear white to a wedding if you're not the bride, don't appeal to those sorts of reasons.

This still doesn't give us a bright line. For example: in the US (and in lot of other places!) it's rude to constantly interrupt people when they talk. Some cases of interrupting don't bump up against the boundary of what we count as moral transgressions. Some people are just socially clueless. But in other cases, constant interruption amounts to not showing respect for the person you're interrupting; it may count as an affront to their dignity. However, we don't just count respect and dignity as matters of manners; they're moral issues too.

So it's doubtful that we'll find bright lines, but we do find not-altogether-blurry ones. In fact (as my earlier answer indicated) this will be so whether or not we're objectivists. The rude can sometimes amount to a wrong.

It is very sad to hear your story. I can give a guess about the awfulness of what you are going through, but I am more certain that I cannot appreciate the full daily horror for you.

Your question is a most reasonable one. Is your mother "alive"? It is interesting that you feel obliged to put this word in scare quotes. It is something that "you can't stop asking yourself". So there is something very important here, an important issue. But you have also answered your own question, or part of it. Let us distinguish between the mental and the physical. Is your mother alive physically? Her body is not dead, if we can put it that way. Is she alive "as a conscious being"? Here you give your own answer: ' . . . she is unconscious about anything [that] is happening around her.' I think perhaps you should say that she is conscious only of the most immediate and restricted domain. That perhaps is part of the reason the question is difficult. She is conscious, but not in a full sense. The whole difficulty about this kind of condition is that it seems to be a kind of living death, and we have not fully developed ethical concepts to match its metaphysical complexity.

I hope this answer does help with your question. You should ask more questions if they present themselves.

It's an interesting question, but especially at the meta-level. I've been thinking about how it should be answered and here's my tentative theory.

One way someone can count as a philosopher is if people who count uncontroversially as philosophers by and large count the person as a philosopher. In this case: if philosophers generally counted MLK as a philosopher, that would be enough to settle the question. As it happens, this isn't the case for MLK (at least, not that I'm aware.)

Another way is if the person's work is the kind of work that philosophers would generally count as philosophy. That's a bit vague, but here's a sort of operationalized version. Suppose we took samples of the person's work and presented them to lots of philosophers (ideally without telling them whose work it was.) If philosophers tended to agree that the work (however valuable it may be) isn't philosophy, that would make a good case for saying no; the person isn't a philosopher. If philosophers tended to agree that the work is philosophy, that would make a good case for saying that the person is a philosopher. What would happen if we tried this test in MLK's case is not something I have an opinion on; I'm simply not familiar enough with his writing.

Now of course, there are things we'd expect to find in work that philosophers counted as philosophy: careful argumentation, attention to concepts, concern with questions that philosophers tend to discuss, discussed in the ways and at the level that philosophers tend to discuss them... But making a reliable list and deciding how the different items ranked would be controversial. My suggestion is a way of cutting the Gordian knot. The simple version is: if philosophers would judge that the work is philosophy, the person who did the work is a philosopher. That's a rough answer, but since it seems plausible to me, it must contain some wisdom!

If we were to deviate from the status quo in which X is disallowed and instead allow for X, allowing for X (which need not itself be morally objectionable or worrisome) will lead to Y, which is morally objectionable or worrisome. Therefore, we should not deviate from the status quo and allow X.

You ask whether the proponent of a slippery slope argument must hold that the first instance is "without much consequence" or if they can instead see it as a "mistake". As the above form indicates, slippery slope arguments generally assume that the deviation from the status quo that 'sets in motion' the slippery slope is not in itself objectionable or worrisome. Dialectically, the point of slippery slope arguments is to concede to one's opponents that the reform in question is not morally objectionable or worrisome, but argue that we ought not to pursue because doing so will lead us down a slippery slope to an objectionable or worrisome state of affairs. Note that this puts both parties to the dispute on common ground with respect to the intrinsic objectionability or worrisomeness of X, i.e., they both agree that X itself is not objectionable or worrisome.

That said, the common ground established for argumentative purposes does not preclude the proponent of the argument from thinking that the deviation in which X is allowed is objectionable or worrisome -- that it too is a mistake, independent of its alleged role in bringing about the objectionable slippery slope. The proponent might accept X 'for the sake of argument' without in fact believing it acceptable.

Quick example: in this country, it's impolite to slurp your soup; not so in some other countries. That's just a matter of differing social norms

Killing innocent people is immoral; it's immoral regardless of where you are, and not just because we happen to have a social norm against it.

Being impolite can also be a moral error, though usually not a big one. It's wrong to upset people for no good reason, and being impolite sometimes has that effect. But it's not just that we have a social custom of not distressing people for no good reason; it's wrong.

Two small points. First, the moral claims above could be subject to qualifications; I leave it to you to consider what such qualifications might be. Second, I haven't argued that it's wrong to distress people for no reason, though the fact that no one one likes having it done to them would be part of any such argument. I also haven't argued that killing innocents is just plain wrong, but similar reasons would apply there with even more force.

In any case, a big part of the distinction is that if we all agree that something is impolite, that pretty much makes it so. But even if we all agree that something is wrong—or right—we could all be mistaken. For example: same-sex intimate relationships weren't wrong even when everyone thought otherwise. Everyone was confused, and the result was a lot of needless misery. The social norms were moral mistakes, albeit wide-spread ones.